Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Spellings

The sentence is a masterclass in bureaucratic persuasion: it sells control as empowerment. Spellings wraps a hard-edged accountability agenda in the soft language of local wisdom, stitching together two popular American instincts that often clash. One is Washington’s demand for measurable outcomes. The other is the civic romance of “folks closest on the ground” knowing best. By yoking them, she makes a top-down system feel bottom-up, even as the premise remains unmistakable: someone will be “held accountable,” and that someone is not the federal policymaker.

The syntax does a lot of political work. “We also believe” implies a reasonable, additive consensus rather than a contested reform. “Those folks closest on the ground” is populist framing: real people, real classrooms, no ivory-tower meddling. Then comes the catch: they’re “holding accountable for the results.” Local actors get discretion only inside a results regime designed elsewhere. Autonomy is conditional; evaluation is the job, but the yardstick is pre-loaded.

Context matters. Spellings, a key education official in the No Child Left Behind era, was operating in a moment when “evidence-based” became a moral claim, not just a technical one. “Which programs get results” sounds neutral, but it narrows public education to a performance dashboard, implicitly sidelining goals that resist easy quantification: civic formation, arts, student well-being, even equity beyond test-score gains.

The intent is to make compliance feel like partnership. The subtext is that local judgment is welcome as long as it lands on the “right” kind of proof.